How did something like that get a patent in the first place?! What are the patent examiners smoking? What's it going to take to get meaningful patent reform in this country? Dear God! The stupid, it burns!

I thought that I've seen the dumbest patents issued already, but this one takes the cake by a long shot. Heck, when I'm doing calculations on my chemistry exams, I tend to round a little bit before I compute the answer since at some point extra decimal places don't really make a difference when calculating pH and equilibrium, so the idea isn't new and isn't limited to computers since I can do it with my brain.

I haven't heard back from the USPTO yet on my patent for this thing I invented I like to call "the number zero"...

You will be hearing from my lawyers, I clearly remember turning in my application the day before you, so you are an infringer...

I know you're probably joking, but afaik patent applications must be sent registered mail, so this kind of issue would be trivial to prove.

More on topic, why in hell would you do rounding before the calculation? Rounding after the calculation reduces accumulated errors. Also, you shouldn't be rounding anything (except when you have underflow/overflow) until you display the result to the user. If you encounter overflow/underflow, an exception should be thrown.

I get there could be memory constraints, but if you have more digits than you need for significant ones to start with, rounding after ensures that you only have one source of error, the rounding. Rounding before means you have two sets.

Rounding before the computation goes counter to every "best practice" I've ever heard of. Can somebody with a deeper understanding please explain how this constitutes an "improvement"? Or is it, as I suspect, a load of cr@p?

It makes me stick to my stomach to read about patent trolls. When you think about how successful those lawyers can be, based on obviously immoral and selfish behavior, and then compare that to the middle-class of America who work honestly and design a lot of that stuff fought over in patents, it's just disgusting.

Davis (whose son is the lawyer for another patent troll, Lodsys) is the chief judge in the district

How is this allowed? I mean even if there is no direct influence on one particular case, I can't imagine that the father wouldn't be unknowingly influenced by the career that his son has chosen to support himself. I know we can't remove Judges because their sons or daughters take up the legal profession, but this one just seems a little too close knit for comfort. He has a vested interest in keeping the system as is, and not dismiss the crap that passes his desk.

While I like this particular outcome, it still illustrates the fundamental issue that the courts have wrong.There is no such thing as "simple math" vs. "non simple math", there is just math. The designation of what is simple or not, is arbitrary and fundamentally based on peoples ignorance of the subject. None of this should ever be patented, and should have no place in court.

Perhaps, in any case based around patents, it should trigger a mandatory re-evaluation of the patent by the USPTO?

Accomplishes two things, hopefully:* Reduces the courts' workload for crap cases from patent trolls* Brings the onus onto the USPTO's doorstep, which might just encourage more careful evaluations of patents

I haven't heard back from the USPTO yet on my patent for this thing I invented I like to call "the number zero"...

You will be hearing from my lawyers, I clearly remember turning in my application the day before you, so you are an infringer...

I know you're probably joking, but afaik patent applications must be sent registered mail, so this kind of issue would be trivial to prove.

More on topic, why in hell would you do rounding before the calculation? Rounding after the calculation reduces accumulated errors. Also, you shouldn't be rounding anything (except when you have underflow/overflow) until you display the result to the user. If you encounter overflow/underflow, an exception should be thrown.

Converting a float to an int will truncate, while using rounding math before conversion will allow you to choose between truncation and proper-rounding. Well, one example anyway.

Congress needs to handle patents in the same way that trademarks are handled: if a company owns patents that it itself is not using to bring products and services to the marketplace then it will automatically lose them to companies that are bringing products and services to market, and so any company suing on behalf of patents it does not use will see such suits automatically tossed and the contested patents forfeited. How can these lawmakers be so smart with trademarks but so stupid with patents?

As a developer / interaction designer, this is really annoying and troubling. We usually take many things for granted such as common user flows, without knowing that we're infringing on patents.

Startups can spend years developing a product, and then get sued by patent trolls like these. Are there any tools out there that can help developers with this issue?

I'd strongly advise against going looking for patents you might be infringing. The fact that you did a search could be used as evidence against you of malicious infringement, even if you didn't turn up the patent you ran afoul of during your search. The penalties for malicious infringement of a patent are far heavier than the ones for simple infringement.

This is a slippery slope though. (While slippery slope arguments are usually silly, they do have a measurable affect in law) All algorithms are nothing but math. The difference between simple and complex math is just a matter of opinion. The fundamentals are the same. The complex math that drives most algorithms is nothing but a lot of little simple math statements. Any and all software can be broken down to this level. If you have a good enough lawyer and a bad enough judge, this decision would seem to invalidate ALL software patents.

For what it is worth, I am not saying that it would be a totally bad thing either. I'm still on the fence on the subject. There are too many moving parts to allow accurately judging the outcome of invalidating software patents.